A retired military serviceman from Nizhny Novgorod Oblast has been sentenced to 18 years in prison for distributing anti-war leaflets.

The 2nd Western District Military Court has sentenced 57-year-old retired military serviceman and ethnic Ukrainian Hennadii Artemenko to 18 years in a strict regime penal colony over distributing anti-war leaflets. This was reported by the First Department.

The regional FSB announced that the man was detained in 2024. However, as OVD-Info was told by the First Department, he was actually detained in autumn 2023—almost a year before the officials made their statement.

According to human rights defenders, Artemenko was charged with state treason (Article 275 of the Criminal Code), incitement to terrorism (Article 205.2), and illegal possession of explosives (Part 1 of Article 222.1). The latter, the First Department believes, were “clearly planted.”

After the search and detention, security officers found that Artemenko was subscribed to Ukrainian Telegram channels on his phone, including the channel of the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar military movement “Atesh.” The Supreme Court declared Atesh a “terrorist organisation” only after Hennadii Artemenko was detained—in November 2024.

According to the investigation, the Ukrainian national contacted representatives of Atesh and, on the coordinator’s instructions, took photos of the FSB office building in Dzerzhinsk and put up movement leaflets on lampposts with the message: “Let’s stop the war together.”

As the First Department notes, the case file contained no correspondence with the “coordinator,” and the prosecutor “could not present it even to the court.”

Human rights groups emphasised that after the war in Ukraine began, Hennadii Artemenko tried to evacuate his elderly mother from there. He contacted the Ukrainian authorities and asked to enter the country for a short period. These messages ended up in the hands of Russian security forces after Artemenko’s email was hacked.

The First Department considers the case against the man to be politically motivated.

“The desire to help one’s mother and a call for peace have long been crimes in the eyes of the security services. <…> For those who still harbour illusions: the torture of a retired military serviceman and planting of gunpowder are now seen as heroism, while saving a mother and showing compassion are the gravest of crimes,” said First Department lawyer Yevgeny Smirnov.